Course Goals

In “If Text Then Code” students will write and critique code as a form of textual engagement, participate in the creation of an online digital edition, and write their own text adventure games. Students will learn scripting and encoding languages to work with and manipulate texts from the fields of literature, history, journalism, and popular culture. In the process, students will engage in close and distant reading, using a variety of DH methods to ask new questions of novels, plays, letters, and news items. Through readings, review of professional scholarly DH resources, discussions with DH scholars at universities in North America and the UK, and most importantly through hands ­on coding and encoding, students will:

Construct research questions and artifacts that demonstrate proficiency in interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of DH methodologies in their specific contexts.

Demonstrate understanding of the collaborative aspects of DH production and demonstrate the ability to work both individually and in group settings.

Analyze and critique the embeddedness of constructions of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in DH scholarly discourse.

Compose reflections that articulate superior understanding of the generative process involved in engagement with DH scholarship. No programming experience is required; rather, we will learn how humanists code.

Over the semester students will gain competency with TEI­ compliant XML, Python and scripting languages including CSS, and Javascript.